Customer Reviews

Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I loved this book from start to finish. It would have been easy for her to pick sides in a raw-milk argument or something like that, but instead she just promotes the pros of real, fresh milk.
The history section as well as the section about the modern milk industry were very interesting, but the recipe sections, complete with "milk experiments" takes the reader on a truly delicious adventures. Start with the Lemon Sponge Pudding!

I bought this book for the recipes (which I haven't tried yet) but to my surprise, I am REALLY finding the historical content fascinating. It's well-written and witty; the author has a lovely sense of humor that comes out in her writing. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a good read about what life has been like for the past 10,000 years, told from the everyday perspective of our relationship with our herd animals and customs over many years. After reading this book I'll be a lot braver about trying some "odd" yogurts and cheeses! (Water Buffalo cream cheese, anyone?)

I found this book a delightful and inviting journey into the natural history of the human relationship with, and creation of, the domestic milk animal and their amazing gift to us!

Read it if you want to learn something new about milk and the animals with whom we have intertwined our lives. Mendelson has done an outstanding job of telling what could otherwise be a tedious tale with wit, verve, and a healthy dose of remarkable details. Keep reading if you want to play and experiment with some of the myriad foods created using milk as a primary ingredient from around the globe.

This is not an easy read, but a rather enjoyable one! Mendelson's prose is vivid and stimulating, but requires some work on the reader's part. If you have the interest, this book will reward, in kind.

This book could have been used as a soapbox, pushing for a certain agenda- promoting milk that is raw, unpasteurized, organic, grass-fed, unhomogenized, or from a specific animal. On the contrary, Mendelson describes the differences while promoting personal exploration. Seek out the variations and try them for yourself; what a novel idea! She appears rather reluctant to endorse a milk genre, though she does voice her opinions and notes the detriment of certain processes on taste and culinary suitability. For me, this was the critical piece in enjoying this book; Mendelson wants to share a fascination and love for milk, no strings attached! What a wonderful read!

The book was interesting, but was not an easy read. It was like a college level textbook. The writing style was dry and academic so it satisfied my desire to learn about the history of milk, but I found myself having to re-read pages because I couldn't keep my mind of what she was writing.

There are a fair amount of recipes and I plan on trying a few. Compared to "How to Pick a Peach" for example the book pales in terms of readability.

I have been collecting butter recipes from old cookbooks and the internet for years and have found this book to be a wonderful resource. Anne Mendelson presents all the recipes worth having within their historical context. It is a thorough look at everything the home cook can do with milk in their own kitchen, with an emphasis on taste.

years ago that a person considered that which comes out of another of another species could be used as a food source. This first occurred in the mid-east, perhaps Iran or Eurasia. It was not cows. They hadn't evolved into the animals we know today. Anne Mendelson points out that these first people to use milk products were highly lactose intolerant. Hence the use of sour milk, low in lactose, as opposed to fresh from the source milk. That led to the development of yogurt which became a mainstay in the diets of many people of the area. This book is divided into two parts. The majority of it is recipes. It is the text & historical record of milk that I am interested in here. The custom of drinking fresh milk daily is a western idea, western Europe Great Britain & North America. These people were not nearly as lactose intolerant. Given the devolopment of dairy cows, the most prolific of milk givers & the improvement of delivery systems to urban dwellers, it became required drinking for health. Dairy cows thrive in the temporate climate of Europe & the Americas. it has since been proven that although nutritious, milk products are not required for good health.
Ms Mendelson starts out, evenhandedly enough, concerning the ongoing debate, even today on the processing of milk. The pasteurized, homogenized, fat reduced, fat free stuff most of us drink vs the straight from the cow, unpasteurized not homogenized full fat milk that tastes oh so good. Soon it is clear that her bias lies with the latter. The amount of fat within the milk can be controlled to some extent by what is fed to the cow, but gone is the day when us urban dwellers received our milk daily from the milkman in glass bottles with a thin film of cream on the top. With proper techniques of hygiene employed one is as safe as the other, all other variables being equal. The sad fact is that although a cow has a natural life span of 20 years, today most of them have become cogs in a vast industrialized complex & are milked out in 3-4 years. Then they just become cheap beef. There is much more in this dense but interesting history. The cookbook portion contains many interesting recipes.

I bought this for its historical element; the recipes are a nice bonus. The narrative takes up about the first half of the book, and that is well researched and written. I plan to try the cheese making recipes, mostly just for fun as I am a "from scratch" cook, mostly as a challenge to myself. The author does come off as quite a "cheese snob" however, and I stumble in getting over her constant references to how trashy our cheese is. Not only does she disparage grocery store milk products (rightly), but she is over the top on her criticism of first-baby-step artisan products as well...the stuff that we can make from the products we can get. Finding non-ultrapasteurized milk product is hard enough, but there has to be some compromise for the efforts of we cooks who make do with what we can get, without the stuffy looking-down-one's-nose attitude of less-than-optimum results from ordinary products.

Beautiful! Part cookbook, part history text....I love it - simple yet ingenious.
Beware: You will get cravings reading this book!

This book was a pretty quick read, because half of it is recipes involving milk, cheese, and other milk products. The other part - the part that I actually read - was about the history of milk and about modern milk production, including a discussion of homogenization and pasteurization. It was really interesting, and although I haven't made any of the recipes, some of them do sound pretty tasty. Recommended if you like food history books.

This book starts out with the history of milch animals and how important these animals were to the development of civilization. She also discusses the components of milk and how it becomes skim, half percent, whole, butter, cream, cheese and so on. She brings up many interesting tidbits to ponder.
The biggest portion of the book is filled with recipes. However it is different than a traditional recipe book. Each recipe is preceded by its history and geography. This information made me more compelled to try making it.
The author doesn't hide or apologize for her preference to unpasteurized milk and shares with the reader her reasons for her choice. Her reasons don't lie in politics, it's just her love of food in both texture and flavor. I honestly expected it to be a book slamming the food industry and politicians, but I was pleasantly surprised to find otherwise. She briefly touches on this in the beginning and admitting that both sides of argument have some extreme arguments that are not wholly accurate and leaves it that as she moves on to what is most important to her.